Early Life and Education
Einstein was born in Ulm and raised in Munich, where his father ran an electrical business. He studied physics and mathematics at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, became a Swiss citizen in 1901, and took a job as a clerk at the patent office in Bern in 1902.
Scientific Career
In 1905, often called his miracle year, Einstein published papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity, and a short paper that led to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc². In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime; observations of a solar eclipse in 1919 confirmed one of its predictions and made him world-famous. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
Later Life
Einstein left Germany in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power and settled in the United States, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1939 he signed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning that Germany might develop atomic weapons, which helped prompt the U.S. nuclear program, though he did not work on it himself. He was an outspoken pacifist and supporter of civil rights, declined an offer to become president of Israel in 1952, and spent his last decades searching unsuccessfully for a unified field theory. He died in Princeton in 1955.
Sources and further reading
Last updated: 2026-09-24